


Qui Peccat Ebrius

by within_a_dream



Category: Benjamin January Mysteries - Barbara Hambly
Genre: Bittersweet, Discussion of addiction, F/M, Gen, Pre-Canon, Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-24
Updated: 2015-12-24
Packaged: 2018-05-08 20:58:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5513099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/within_a_dream/pseuds/within_a_dream
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Philippa loved him and hated him in equal measure.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Qui Peccat Ebrius

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Nary](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nary/gifts).



> Title from a Latin legal phrase: "Qui peccat ebrius, luat sobrius" (He who sins drunk must be punished sober).

He had always been kind. Even when he’d come home from a night of drinking and gambling away money they could scarcely afford to lose, smelling of wine and other women (or men, she’d come to suspect), he was kind. How was Philippa meant to reconcile the kind young man who had wooed her with the drunken wastrel currently sharing her bed?

Alec had played her a song, when they’d first met. He could make the notes fly from his violin birds scattering from the trees, or stretch out the melody like molasses, or anything in between. He had played her the song, and kissed her hand, and when she asked what he’d played for her, responded, “Oh, nothing in particular. It reminded me of you.”

Who wouldn’t have agreed to marry him? She was sixteen, trapped on her parents’ rundown rural estate but allowed no part in running it, and a handsome young man came up to her and played a string of arpeggios on his violin that he said sounded like the flecks of gold in her eyes. She was smitten.

It didn’t occur to her until the week of the wedding that perhaps she ought to be frightened. She knew enough of marriage to know that husbands could be cruel, and however kind Alec seemed, their courtship had been short. For all Philippa knew, she’d signed herself away to a lifetime of abuse and drudgery. ( _Nothing could be worse than here_ , a part of her thought, but the rest of her knew that to be untrue. Tabitha had married last year, and now she scarcely left the house save for balls—and even then, wearing heavily-caked-on-rouge to disguise the bruises.) But Alec had never drawn too close to her during their visits, or tried to so much as sneak a kiss on the cheek, and perhaps it was foolish, but she trusted him. He seemed eminently trustworthy.

They were married in the spring, when the snow had begun to melt and the air smelled of growth and the dull brown earth was slowly speckled over in green. The day passed in a blur of relatives and neighbors and social formalities, and when the night came, Alec (as always) was kind. Philippa’s mother had led her to believe that her wedding night would be an ordeal to endure, but she was adrift from the second Alec’s lips touched hers.

His fingers undid the ties at the back of her dress, more delicate than they had any right to be. She leaned in to kiss him and he started, a hand catching on the ribbons.

“Be careful! You’ll tear them.”

“They won’t break that easily.” But he slowed, bringing one hand up to cup her face as the other slid the ribbons out of their eyelets, one by one, the ghost of silk against her skin making her shiver.

The dress slipped off, and Alec slid it to the side, leaving it unceremoniously crumpled at the corner of the bed. “You’ll want it out of the way,” he said when she protested.

She did want it out of the way, Philippa found. Alec kissed her chest, then her stomach, then between her legs, and soon she’d forgotten about the dress entirely.

 

It hadn’t occurred to her that night to wonder where he’d learned his way around a woman. Nor did she wonder on her wedding day what he’d seen in her to convince him to go through with the marriage. No matter; she learned soon enough.

 

A month passed before she first saw him drunk. It was amusing those first few times; he lost little of his eloquence, but the wine loosened his tongue. Philippa learned more about him that night in his study than she had during their first month of marriage: stories about bars and brothels and his cousin and his friends. He trod a bit too close to rakishness, perhaps, but Philippa loved him. She loved his smile, the way he gently took her hand when they walked, his habit of standing in the parlor after supper and playing whatever came to mind while she sat and listened. In the beginning, she didn’t mind the drink.

 

Time went on, and Alec came home drunk more often. Then he came home smelling of other women’s perfume, and other men’s cigars, and something sickly sweet that Philippa’s parlor maid told her was opium. That is, when he came home at all—he didn’t bother some nights. Philippa knew that left to his own devices, he’d while away all the money they had and then some; she knew too that he’d married her to gain control of his own purse-strings. And she knew, as much as she wanted to forget it, that she still loved him.

She wouldn’t have minded sharing him with other people. But the opium took and took and took, money they couldn’t afford to lose and the husband she’d loved so much when they married.

Then came the baby.  Alec was a fine father, when he was at home and when he was sober (and sometimes when he wasn’t, although once he noticed Philippa’s discomfort he began to keep away from Gerry when he was drunk).

  
He still played like an angel. It wasn’t enough to make up for the nights he spent at taverns or gaming houses or opium dens, bleeding away the money they needed to run the estate. Sometimes she wished it could be, that she could sit in the parlor and listen to her husband play Bach and Vivaldi and the songs she’d grown up singing, blending together so thick in the air she could nearly see them. But they had a son, and they had tenants, and it didn’t matter how tenderly Alec held the child or how sorrowfully he came home to Philippa in the mornings, she couldn’t stand by as he bankrupted them. Of course, her reaction didn’t mean much in the end. She could scold and cry and rage all she wanted, he’d still leave for the tavern the next night.

Still, it hurt more than she’d expected it to when the news came from Paris. She walled off the jagged edges of her heart with bitterness, and she steeled herself against any sweetness that might slip back in with her memories. Gerry stopped asking about his father—or stopped asking _her_ , at least.

She never stopped loving him. You could only truly hate someone that you loved, Philippa thought. Although everyone told her how Gerry took after her, some days she would look at the way his eyes glinted in the sun or the way he grinned, and see Alec, and her heart would be torn open all over again.

 

When Gerry came back from America with a wife and stories of a friend of his father’s, Philippa knew. Perhaps she should have been angry that her husband had caused her so much grief, but truth be told, she’d used up all of her anger for him long ago. She thought of Alec sitting with Gerry when he was barely knee-high, teaching him how to hold a violin, and was glad that he’d had some chance to see his son grown.

She couldn’t bring herself to tell Gerry. Philippa understood that in leaving, Alec had saved their family and saved himself; Gerry almost certainly wouldn’t. Perhaps one day he’d look up at the last portrait in the hall and see echoes of a man he thought he might remember. Perhaps he’d never realize who he’d met. She was grateful that the whims of fate had brought her this, and she would leave the rest to fate as well.


End file.
